Bear with me on the red triangle motif for this blog. I come to it at the end but if you can stick with me you’ll see why. This image comes from the studio – a tableau showing a game of blind man’s buff (gallina ciega) and a painting in which I invoke the multi-layered gallina ciega (literally blind chicken – here the triangle reads as beak), the red triangle which formed part of the identification system for certain prisoners in Nazi camps and the Catalan hat.
N.B. Blind in this blog post is not used in relation to people with actual impaired vision, nor is it employed as a pejorative term.
A chance encounter in a bookstore has brought Jorge Semprún into my life. I’m now reading Literature or Life (English translation: Viking Books 1997) Semprún on Buchenwald, to which he was deported in 1943 at the age of 20 for his part in the French Resistance, turned in by a double agent working for the gestapo. He was in fact a Spanish exile, whose diplomat father brought the family to France at the fall of the Second Republic. The family had left Madrid when Semprún was eight years old to take up a diplomatic post – vitally his father had taught him German one factor which was to help spare his life in Buchenwald. The other being a clerk receiving prisoners at Buchenwald reassigned this Spanish political prisoner’s status from student to craftsman – even though Semprún not realising the implications for his survival at the time had insisted on the truth that he was a student – a student of philosophy at the Sorbonne.
These two chance occurrences (the Buchenwald clerk – a German communist risked his own life in committing this clerical “error”) were key. A German speaker could understand instructions, know what was happening and be useful, a craftsman of higher value than a student, and the camp needed skilled workers. Semprún landed an administrative post and “survived”, although in reality he says he underwent a collective death in Buchenwald despite the enduring and sustaining fraternalism among those who were also witness and subject to it. His book is part memoir and part meditation on the impossibility of testimony and transmission of this memory to those who have not “lived” or rather also died through it. Yet art, as he and his brothers in death discuss on liberation, must be the mediator for dissemination and through which others might also witness. Literature or Life also contains within it the acknowledgement of a near impossibility of memory and the act of transmission for the victim of this collective death experience – thus the act of writing for those who famously did often led to suicide – Semprúm himself observes in an extended interview for Spanish TV – Primo Levi being perhaps the most notable example.
Semprún waited a long time to begin this process, understanding that a period of amnesia was vital to him – though in truth the smell of the Buchenwald crematory could invade his nostrils at any time without warning. The awkwardness of others around his camp survival was soon evident on liberation – death, that death, that truth and it’s traces in Semprún’s eyes were rarely met with openness or indeed the permissive silence he needed to bring forth the torrent of words held within.
So much wisdom. Semprún both takes one by the hand and spares nothing. My reading is accompanied by Ralph Vaughan Williams – a newfound auditory obsession. I find this helps my skittering mind to focus, and as I plough deeper in to this text, the beautiful clarity of Semprún’s voice, and it’s non-linearity begin to unfurl his tale to reveal a string of pearls from which we must learn – we must. Golden nuggets. Clusters of words, configured just so, to reveal at once the bare bones (excuse the indelicacy of such an allusion) of the matter. The four metre high pile of yellowing twisted corpses with their strangled death-crazed mask-like faces never leaves the building, as it were. It is mentioned often – the elephant in the room. That which cannot adequately be counted or documented, that which must be felt, died through even though we were not there. Memory he says dies with the first hand witness in a further YouTube interview.
One night, three months after liberation Semprún is woken by the german cry over the camp tannoy. Unable to discern that he is rousing to freedom he feels he is waking from his dream of liberation to the truth of camp life once more – but truly he is in Paris and it is 2am. Staggering to a friend’s house at 3 O’clock in the morning he is offered coffee and silence – permissive silence. His friend’s daughter is beyond anxiety for news of her lover whose destiny is unknown and is yet to return from Buchenwald and beyond. Semprún at last finds a voice.
“Jeanine had sunk to her knees on the carpet. Pierre-Aimé Touchard was huddled in his armchair.
I was not to speak of such things again for sixteen years, at least not in such excruciating detail. I talked until dawn, until my voice faltered and grew hoarse, until I lost my voice completely. I told of sweeping despair, of death in it’s slightest twists and turns.
I did not speak in vain apparently.
Yann Dessau finally did return from Neuengamme. Clearly, we must sometimes speak in the name of the missing. Speak in their name, in their silence, to give them back the power of speech.”
There have been so many excerpts I could have chosen although I am only beginning to touch on Part Two of this extraordinary work. Yet this remembrance is especially pertinent – written more than 40 years after these events took place it must of course have become shaped by time, the evolution of character and Semprún’s self-evidently reflexive personality, and as ever in the literary process sculpted into this very configuration of words and no other. It is the time passed, the death after life (as Semprún would have it) in the camps, and the vessel of language honed, which enables transmission beyond the life-saving moment in which Semprún was able to eject his suffering, open the door of both death and hope to his companions, and summon his missing compatriot.
The truth of his observation that we must speak in the name of the missing to give them back the power of speech goes a long way to answering the question put to me at a recent conference. I was asked about an article for Palette Pages written in May 2014, in which I describe mine as a healing project. Could I expand on this? I was not too coherent in the moment.
http://www.thepalettepages.com/2014/05/04/art-healing-sonia-boue/
What I would have like to have said is this. My project in a nutshell is to invoke the missing – undo the process by which the exiles were silenced and erased from history by Franco’s deliberate policy of suppression and to restore the power of speech. I speak mainly of my father – the only exile I am truly qualified to invoke. Through Semprún I begin to unpick the mechanisms of silence in the great chasm between experience and non-experience. The substantial problem of how and what to say and the ultimate inadequacy of language to convey it. In this sense the exile’s silence in life tells us more than words. Her/his literature is the ultimate source for our remembering.
I have also recently reread a brilliant and fascinating article by Eric Dickey entitled, “Voices from Beyond the Grave: Remembering the Civil War in the Work of Max Aub.”
http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/doc/08_DICKEY.pdf
Here I found Aub’s reflection that:
“La gente existe mientras vive. Luego, empieza lentamente a morir en los demás. Desaparece, teñida de sombras, en el olvido” (Soldevila Durante 207) (People exist as long as they are living. Then, they begin to die slowly in everybody else. They disappear, tinged in shadows, in oblivion).
The imperative is then with the living containers of the memory of the dead to respond; speak, write, create. That then is me – I am at present a living though metaphorical defibrillator. And this is my obligation. Until I die, I must speak in order for my father’s voice to be heard – and he is not yet thus truly forgotten. Not that I speak for him (he is more than capable of speaking for himself) but rather of him.
Returning now to the red triangle – a motif which appeared suddenly in my work about three weeks ago. A figure, a tree, a chicken’s beak, a symbol? Apart from the beak which felt most true I was puzzled until I turned to the Nazi system of identification and classification of prisoners and found that Spanish prisoners were marked by an inverted red triangle with a black S for Spanien. Only after this discovery did I recognise the dashing line in burnt umber as a potential S in flight, billowing or breaking free. The Catalan hat came to me somewhere in-between beak and fascist badge. This allusion is strong too – I had been slowly working my way towards the Catalan conference, Artistic Interventions in the Virtual Space, for quite some time – Míro’s Head of a Catalan Peasant, spied at the Tate retrospective some years ago, an almost conscious reference danced before my eyes.
And here is a Catalan hat I made earlier when in March 2015 I converted two Polish dolls into a Catalan couple for a video which is yet to be made.
I don’t want to read too much into this. I naturally abhor too tight an interpretation of any work, yet it is important to uncover the layers that float within it always, and marvel at the unconscious, that wise act of following your nose (or in this case beak) and abandoning reason to the gods of process when making. It is often when we are most lost that we can find our way. This much I learn each time I am working, but the knowledge becomes more secure each time and one can risk more and delve deeper.
But how can my unconscious have registered prior information about the red triangle as camp symbol, which became obvious later on, through an obsessive tracking of Semprún’s online presence on YouTube. I needed to hear his voice, I need to see him. A video interview in which Semprún talks about the red triangle in some detail (and we see one) provided a eureka moment with my triangle. These are precisely the unknowables – of when unconscious material becomes lodged in the brain. Of course I first came across the camps aged 15 – this information could have been encountered then when repulsion and fear were the limits of my understanding. It must further be linked to the sudden conscious knowledge gained in February 2014 that my grandparents evaded the Mauthausen camp roundup of 1940 when they hid overnight in a nearby forest. They had been tipped-off and saved themselves along with my great grandmother Mery. Otherwise they too would have worn the red triangle with the S for Spanien. Yet they might not have. It is entirely possible that they would have been among those “liquidated” on arrival – my grandfather and great-grandmother were older and none knew german, had a craft or stand out practical skill, being civil servants. I flinch as I write this truth. The forest and the loose tongue that warned them, spared them.
I am indebted to both Max Aub and Goya for the Gallina Ciega motif in recent work, which has included two short video pieces photographed on the post memory set in the studio. And the painted backdrops.
Aware of the multiple layers within the game of Gallina Ciega in relation to Spanish history I have begun to realise that it might also allude to the leap of faith in the creative process into the unconscious, and a renewed focus on the importance of art as healing in this process. It’s never too far from my mind. It can thus be both emblematic of the current Spanish government’s foolish policy of fudging memory and the wisdom of the movement to exhume it – a game played to national detriment in one sense and also with potential for reconstruction in another.
It is surely art which has the potential to swing the balance away from our most feared negative outcomes – a lack of resolution, a history on a loop destined to repeat it’s mistakes. Doesn’t art allow us to look at truths less flinchingly and with more courage. Through the Gallina Ciega work I can allude to blind policy, I can point to the camps and I can say that Spanien died and lived the collective death of a holocaust there. All because there are only dolls at play, only me with my camera and a sand tray. All because a red triangle can be so many things.
Literature or Life, suggests that there is a choice to be made – or that in writing about Buchenwald Semprúm must die again that collective death. I think he must, but that it is nonetheless redemptive. How can such beautiful writing not be so – he “dies” so that we can witness. I am beyond astonishment at the very thought of it and I can’t stop myself from reading on, earphones in on a Vaughan Williams loop.
